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Month: September 2010

Today has been an interesting day for me. I was invited to attend and contribute to an ICT Steering Group in the local authority where I work.

I have been complaining to whoever would listen for a long time that I do not see the sorts of things happening in schools that I have seen on video or read about on blogs. I have learnt so much about the great things that are happening at schools all around the world that have embraced the potential of technology to allow children to learn and most importantly to gain essential skills that they will need for their future.

I started the day by following a Tweet from John Carver the Superintendent of The Van Meter Schools in Iowa, where I have developed a fruitful connection online discussing their wonderful 1:1 Laptop methods and their work in exploring virtual reality for their students. This was the Tweet:

This was a post from a student Reanne Maskert who is a part of a wonderful new venture which has linked a PLN class from Van Meter Iowa with a class in the Monsignor Bonner and Archbishop Prendergast Catholic High School in Drexel Hill, Pa. The students have linked up using social media and the communications capability that programs such as Skype presents schools with. See http://thestudentplnconnect.blogspot.com/2010/09/start-of-something-greatconnecting.html

I find this venture really exciting and felt the need to make a comment on Reanne’s post which I found inspiring and so well written (proving the learning potential of blogging in schools and the motivation to write to communicate as can be seen in this instance).

I then travelled to the meeting of the Steering Committee and was so pleased to see that the real potential of ICT was at least being acknowledged. We all accepted that our schools need to move forward. I spoke about the opening up of our schools to social media. THere was sharp intake of breath and then we all discussed the need to underpin everything by a concentration on internet safety.

It was pointed out that Ofsted had recently come out with a report that stated that the best schools that they had seen in terms of ICT use were schools where social media and mobile technology had been embraced and the dangers of misuse and misinformation were tackled and pointed out by everyone.

I feel that we are still fearful of the dangers that social media can present… but we need to understand that we cannot ignore it… and that it also presents us with great opportunities for learning and communication that far outweigh the dangers.

I cam home to a Tweet that had a link to an article in Mashable (an excellent website that I always try and follow). The article was called “The Case For Social Media In Schools” I feel that this is an excellent article that argues the case for allowing web 2.0 into schools.

We must fight the fear factor if we are to move forward. I was pleased by the meeting I attended because there were some very wise and able people who had a good understanding of ICT and how much it can contribute to our children’s learning in the town where I work. But the fear factor was there and we may go too slowly and hesitantly because of it. At least we have made a start and hopefully there will be some changes for me to report in the next few months.

I have never understood the reasoning behind extending the school day or indeed the school year.

I think that it all comes down to the idea that quantity somehow will produce quality. But that isn’t the case. The end result of what we do in schools is supposed to be about children’s learning. Children do not learn in an arithmetic progression… they make progress that most agree is based on spurts of progress, some backward lurches and most of the time a steady plateau of what seems like no progress at all.

The extension of the school day will therefore not, in itself, produce the great lurch forward in learning. It may happen at 5 p.m. when the child would otherwise have been at home or in the park or in the streets or somewhere else… or the extra hour or two may just be seen as dead time… to be gone through because it has been designated that they need to be there… children do not learn to order or to time… it is not a thing that can be mapped out or graphed.

So why do it? We could just as easily make an argument that, if we knew what magic potion would lead to improved learning that we could actually decrease the school day because once the child has learnt the things that they are intended to learn they can just tick the box and smile and go home!

The answer lies in creating the right environment for learning and that means buildings and access to technology. It means teachers who are motivated and not under pressure to produce results like a magician pulling rabbits out of a hat.

We are in a time of change for the world as much as for education. The length of the school day will not produce magical results. The importance of education is quite rightly being seen as central to enabling schoolchildren to participate fully in the world of tomorrow. The debate is right but needs to be based on common sense not slogans. “Lengthening the school day” will not produce the answers… enabling children to learn the skills they need for the flat world that they live in needs quality and not quantity.

I have written in an earlier blog about how I did a search on 9/11 and the terrible events of that day on Google and also on Sweetsearch (see my post: Two Searches on 9/11 ).

I stated then that I found the Google search rather controversial in its main three links as against the excellent links to the Library of Congress and other sites that the Finding Dulcinea organisation, that runs Sweetsearch, had validated before they put up their search list.

Recently I did some more searches on Sweetsearch and found that they have changed their site to include the “Yolink” program which they work with. For those of you who do not know about Yolink, it is a powerful means of being able to see more extensive searches and allows students to search for key words or phrases in texts which come from searches. For more information I did a Sweetsearch on Yolink and came up with the following:

All search results pages on Sweetsearch are now automatically enhanced by Yolink.

Together Sweetsearch and Yolink utterly transform Web research for students

SweetSearch, enhanced by Yolink, enables students to review a long list of vetted links relevant to their task, and then save those results to a Google Doc (with the link included), EasyBib’s citation generator, or social bookmarking services.

I find this new way of searching powerful and most importantly, Finding Dulcinea have validated the information which Google does not.

I believe that this is a powerful means for children to get information, one that teachers can rely on because it will not mislead or misinform or involve aspects of a subject that express opinion clothed as fact.

I am aware that Google has entered our vocabulary as a verb and just a few hours ago, at a course I intended, I heard mature Consultants saying “I’ll just google it”. It will certainly be a really good day for education if I heard children say “I sweetsearched it and found…”

If you’ve never encountered Sweetsearch before go to http://www.sweetsearch.com/ it may well change your outlook on web searching and if you’re a teacher, it might well transform the material, means and relevance of searching for your students.

The world of technology and its potential to change education and open up a new world of possibilities for our children amazes me and inspires me. Two posts from excellent bloggers has reminded me though that we must not forget the good things that come from the past as we proceed into the wonderful world of our globally connected village school.

It also made me think about a great discussion that I took part in this week about Face to Face learning and e-learning in education which took place on #edchat on Twitter. As usual with these discussions there was a rich debate about the potential for an electronic classroom and there were those who said…hold on..we still need to have face-to-face. I found that I was very much in the latter camp as I believe that children need a social interaction with each other, they need to physically connect and also they need to touch and feel and see others doing the same.

As a person fascinated by history I understand the need to make sure that,as we move forwards towards a brave new world, we do not forget the really good things that made us who we are and created the basis for what we will become.

I was pleased therefore that, within a few hours of each other, I read two excellent blog posts that brought to mind what I had been thinking about. That we must always learn from the past, take the good things that the past gives us and also not forget the validity and importance that these people and things have for us now.

The first posting was by Sarah Edson whose blog is called “Learning Off the Beaten Path”. I got the link to this posting from Mark Moran who is the CEO of the excellent organisation “Finding Dulcinea” and who I am pleased to say I follow on Twitter and am a friend of on Facebook. I get a lot of excellent links from Mark and try to follow up as many as I can. Mark did a link to his “Finding Dulcinea Blog” with a recent entry on “The Importance of Great Educators, Again” http://blog.findingdulcinea.com/2010/09/the-importance-of-great-educators-again.html

This blog post had links to a number of his recent entries on the blog including a brilliant video of a (then) twelve year old keynote speaker, Dalton Sherman, speaking at an Educational Conference in Dallas in 2008 as well as an interview with the wonderful and inspirational Maya Angelou, where she talked about her life and how her love for poetry got her to overcome her elected silence from the age of 8 to 12.

Notwithstanding the power and importance of these two links, it was the third link that was to lead me to Sarah Edson and her wonderful post “I Need You” http://www.sarahedson.com/

This was a simply beautiful post. In it Sarah recalls the last days of her wonderful mother’s life. She shows us in the post just how much she learned from her mother, including the ability to read and use sign language, which her mother had taught her because she believed in all forms of communication in order to get through to the children she taught.

I will not discuss the whole post here excepting to say that it is wonderfully written and moving and would be something that any one of us bloggers would be proud to have “penned”.

This last word “penned” conveniently leads me to the second blog post that I read just a few hours after being moved and inspired by Sarah’s post. I am a follower of a really excellent blogger by the name of Shelly Blake-Plock who writes a blog called “Teach Paperless”. Shelly’s posts are usually fascinating insights into the way that he uses technology to teach history and social studies. He is an excellent user of the technology and I would love to be in his class as I am sure I would learn so much.

His latest post though was a powerful one that actually showed how, after studying the genocide in Darfur and the civil war in the Sudan he got his students to actually get out their pens and put the old technology of pen to paper in order to write to their Senator about their feelings in respect of the atrocities they had looked at and what was being done about the aftermath now.

Both of these posts remind us of the importance of not forgetting the past. There are great educators, like Sarah’s mother and great processes, such the skill of writing on a piece of paper and the development of your own distinctive handwriting style (indeed of calligraphy) that have shaped what we are today and need to be taken into the world of what we will become tomorrow.

Yes, we do need to celebrate the potential that technology gives us, but we must not rush into the fully electronic classroom at the expense of denying our children personal contact with inspiring adults, of the ability to manipulate materials,to act and jump and climb, to paint and to dance with one another. If we do that we will have lessened our humanity and done a disservice to our children and their children.

I have seen all the discussion about the Oprah show and “Waiting For Superman”. It seems fascinating as seen from afar (I live in the U.K.)

Here in the U.K. we seem not to be waiting for a superhero but to be returning at a fast pace to our late and much admired Queen Victoria.

In these hard times, when so many people are afraid for their public sector jobs (myself included) we appear to feel that the only way forward in the twenty first century is to march backwards toward the nineteenth!

The answer to a world which has transformed into a flat globalised, instant-access global village is to compete against the likes of China and India by making sure that our children have a narrow curriculum dominated by rote learning and a knowledge of the good Kings and bad Queens (or is that the other way around?)

It seems laughable to me that places such as China have begun to transform their education systems from a strict, test-obsessed one to a more creative and collaborative one at just the time when my own country is going for Victoria and the U.S. is waiting for Superman to come back by enticing him to return to a country that sacks teachers who have a tiny percentage drop in their test results!

I recently did a training session with a group of newly qualified teachers. I prepared my Prezi very carefully and decided that I was going to put an emphasis on networking and the setting up of self-support systems using social media and in particular the # communities that can be instantly set up using Twitter.

Now, I am 57 years of age, a highly experienced teacher who is self-taught in web 2.0 and has learnt many things as I have ventured into the strange and yet exciting world that social media has given us.

I now have just about 650 followers on Twitter, I regularly join the #edchat and #ukedchat forums and have picked up some excellent links to new sites and ideas from the discussions, notwithstanding the opportunity that it has given me to clarify my own position on many of the things that are discussed. I know where I stand on tests and testing, on Project Based Learning, on the need to introduce new technology into schools, to promote social interaction for students on a local, national and international basis. I know that I want to see creativity encouraged and forming the basis of any curriculum and I want children to be educated in digital literacy as a key literacy for their future and ours.

Coming from this background I was surprised, to say the least when I found that the 14 NQT’s who I was working with in my training did not have any real views on any of these matters. They were particularly negative in respect of the power of social interaction and the ability to use Twitter (or Facebook) as a means to network with each other and support each other.

Last year, I tried to set up a self-support community for Year 4 (Grade 3) teachers who were attempting to develop their subject knowledge in primary mathematics. Only one teacher of the 23 teachers involved actually got involved! I was told that this was because they were very busy people who did not have the time to add an extra task to their overwhelming workload by taking time to communicate and support each other online. This seems strange to me as many of the people who I network with on my PLN, or Twitter, or Facebook are incredibly busy teachers, many of them deputy heads or headteachers and yet they not only find the time to take part in online discussions but also run really useful and successful blogs!

I remember one occasion a few months ago when a Twitter friend put out a request for links to sites on zoos as he was covering this with his class in the following week. With a few minutes he had received over twenty replies, all with good links that he was able to use with his class. (I was one of the respondents!)

I felt rather despondent therefore when I had finished my training. The part of my Prezi that related to Twitter as a powerful means to network went down like a lead balloon! I was the only Tweeter in the room. They just did not get it….they probably don’t get the power of web 2.0 and how it will eventually transform education.They are NQT’s at the start of what I hope will be a long and rewarding career. They are entering education at a time when there is a great conflict between the past and the present (with the past being in power on both sides of the Atlantic and selling us their Victorian dreams). In their career they will see China and perhaps India overtake the United States as a leading economic power. They will see more and more powerful computers and especially mobile devices and the introduction of new technology into the home, the workplace and eventually (kicking and screaming) into the classrooms that they will be teaching in.

I just wonder what the training colleges are getting up to that they do not see this reality or understand how important the issues that I have become involved in (like PBR and creativity and web 2.0) will effect these young teachers and the children in their classes. All student teachers should be aware of the issues and how it will effect them in the future. I also feel that social networking will actually transform their teaching and their views of the issues… just look at how it has transformed my outlook and attitudes nearing the end of my career.